Get It Through Your Fat Head

Fat Wars is the name of a new series in Newsweek, featuring op-eds about how We Have the Power to Change our Weight, and The Real Cause of Obesity (it’s genetics). Both columns, in a cool, collected and organised way, explain their conflicting views about weight. Blogger Kate Harding, “Queen of the Fat-o-Sphere,” tears both to shreds in her impassioned response.

The first article spends the whole first page detailing how many Americans are how fat and how much that costs everyone. The second page begins to offer weight-loss tips, such as:

Take a walk on your lunch hour or use the stairs at work instead of the elevator. Add an extra vegetable to your shopping cart. Push back from the table instead of having a second helping. Take a walk after work with your family. Get the kids off the couch and into the yard or park.

Really fat people should get clinical interventions and political leaders should adopt policies that encourage better health decisions. It ends having not offered one shred of evidence that we have the power to change our weight. Considering that this is taken as writ in almost every publication, it is shocking that they didn’t give us anything to chew on. I guess because it is taken as writ, we should just trust them:

We know that by reducing obesity, we can reap savings. It is also the right thing to do from a health perspective. This isn’t rocket science—it’s just plain common sense.

The second article begins by discussing the fact that fat people suffer abuse for being fat, and have so since the time of Shakespeare. His premise is that genetics, more than any other factor, decides a person’s weight:

Genetic studies have shown that the particular set of weight-regulating genes that a person has is by far the most important factor in determining how much that person will weigh. The heritability of obesity—a measure of how much obesity is due to genes versus other factors—is about the same as the heritability of height… As nutrition has improved over the past 200 years, Americans have gotten much taller on average, but it is still the genes that determine who is tall or short today… Our modern lifestyle is thus a necessary, but not a sufficient, condition for the high prevalence of obesity in our population.

He looks at the case of an English boy who had a mutation in the gene that produces leptin, which is involved in satiety. At the age of four he was eating 1125 calories a meal, and weighed 90 lbs. When he was shot with leptin his in-take dropped to 180 calories a meal and by the age of six he was normal weight. The change must have been caused by the shot:

Nothing changed except the hormone levels: his parents weren’t more or less permissive, his snacks did not switch from processed to organic, his willpower was not bolstered. Rather this boy was a victim of a malfunctioning weight-regulating system that led to an uncontrollable drive to eat.

He said that there was no evidence that healthy fat people need to reduce their weight to normal, but added that those suffering from health related issues can benefit from losing weight. The focus should be on health – not weight. “So if you are thin, it might be more appropriate for you to thank your own “lean” genes and refrain from stigmatizing the obese.”

Kate Harding (who crusades for fat acceptance on her website Shapely Prose) takes issue with the 300,000 deaths a year he attributes to obesity and obesity related issues. Apparently that stat was wrong and the CDC’s study actually concluded that “Based on those figures, the net US death toll from excess weight is 26,000 per year. By contrast, researchers found that being underweight results in 34,000 deaths per year.”

Seeing that error — four years after that crucial revision came out — automatically makes me think I can’t take the person talking seriously. Which sucks, because in this particular debate, Friedman is, generally speaking, the one dealing in reality.

She disagrees with the “we have the power to change our weight” premise, citing a 2007 UCLA study which reviewed 31 studies and concluded that dieters were not able to keep the weight off and questioned whether the weight loss itself lead to any health benefits. The problem with these studies is that what the obese people to do lose weight is what we should all be doing to keep healthy. The assumption that correlates bad health choices with obesity (the worse your choices are the heavier you are) is just not true.

No one disputes that a steady diet of junk food and a sedentary lifestyle are bad for your health. But A) Many fat people can and do eat balanced diets and exercise just as much as thin people without losing weight — that’s where the whole genetic thing comes in — and B) plenty of thin people suffer from health issues related to lifestyle choices, but the default assumption is that they’re “taking care of themselves” because they don’t happen to have fat genes. Eating a balanced diet and exercising can be beneficial for all of us, but they will not cause permanent weight loss in most of us — and there’s no real proof that we’d be markedly better off if they did.

Harding also quibbles with their suggestion that fat people lose 5-10% of their body weight. For most fat people, such a small decrease would have a negligible effect on their health, even if they could keep it off (which she doubts). It would, however, nudge them onto the cycle of yo-yo dieting, which actually makes you fatter.

“[T]o win the fight against obesity,” Thorpe and Ferguson write, “all of us need to be individually committed.” Really? All of us? What role do people who aren’t fat play in this, exactly? If you mean they need to be constantly reminding fat people that we’re disgusting, unlovable, smelly, lazy, undisciplined, and above all, unhealtheeeeeee, then as a whole, they’re doing a bang-up job already. (This does not, of course, apply to all thin people. Some of my best friends are thin!) So I’m pretty sure what you mean is “Fat people need to be individually committed” to fighting their own bodies. To which I’d point out: Most of us already are. Who the fuck do you think is keeping the $50 billion dollar weight loss industry afloat? Magic sprites?

For Harding, the main point is discrimination. Why are people so set on fixing a problem that may not even exist? Why are we obsessing about how well another person lives their life?

[A]bove all, fat people are human beings. Which means we can hear you. And our continued fatness is not a personal attack on you or our country or our healthcare system, but the result of complex factors science is only beginning to understand, and in very many cases, something we have already tried our damnedest to change.

I would have loved to have given the “we have the power to change our weight” guys a chance to state their case, but they didn’t make one. All they did was give us a pep talk about being in this together. I just find it hard to believe that more and more people are making a choice to be miserable. Nobody wants to be fat.